GuitarPrinciples.com Forum

by **Mark SL** » Wed Nov 03, 2010 12:57 am

I had a chat with my uncle about guitar and specifically how he went out about learning 25+ years ago. He is an amazing guitarist, plays in a local band on the weekends that is quite popular in his town. can learn popular songs in minutes and then start rippin solos over them on the fly.

Anyway, he said he just played to beatles and tom petty records all the time.

This got me thinking, maybe us youngsters, or those just starting no matter what your age, are at a disadvantage due to technology. Super easy access to any tab for any song you want. And then people showing you how to play them on youtube. We are basically relying on everyone and everything besides our own faculties to learn how to play.

Maybe this makes it too easy for us. When my uncle wanted to learn a song, he bought the record, sat down with his guitar and listened to it over and over and over until he figured it out by ear. This most likely, trained his ear, trained his transposing, and also trained his rhythm because he was only playing with the album. (as opposed to how I used to do it, give it a couple listens, and then just look at the tabs, never getting it down pat enough to play along)

But what's funny is I asked him about playing slow, and he said, most definitely, he would just listen to a measure or two, play it till he got it, figure out the bass notes, then figure out the chords from there, then play it slow again and again.

Must be some people out there who instinctively get it, maybe the lack of technology helped in this case

by **Stan** » Wed Nov 03, 2010 7:30 am

I learned like your uncle... Only with Russian songs, not Beatles...

definitely trains a lot of things.

by **alcoyot** » Sun Nov 07, 2010 11:40 am

Tabs have got to be the worst way to read music. For one thing most of them on the net are completely wrong,not even in the right ballpark. And also they don't tell you the timing, articulation, note values, or a lot of other things. For rock music, even traditional music notation doesn't cut it because it can't tell you the way to do a bend, or how certain rhythms are played.
I think most music still has to be learned by ear, tab and music notation is only a temporary crutch.

by **Stan** » Sun Nov 07, 2010 2:12 pm

Any music written down is like a coloring book, really. It gives you the pattern, but it's up to you to "color" it any which way you see fit and make it into SOMETHING.

Tabs - I use tabs, but with some discretion - if it doesn't sound right - I'll look for another tab. Sometimes I will use a combination of two or three tabs where one has a certain piece right... and another has a different piece right.... etc.

by **N E Y** » Sat Dec 11, 2010 11:33 pm

Not only the tabs and the web-clips are spiritually demoralizing aspiring guitarists but so is , reliance on book learning for composition and improvisation.

Most cannot improvise or compose because they were emotionally and spiritually neutered like the castrated kitty cats in our homes by brainwashing through the web and the schools. Real artists do things very differently and most who fantasize lazily about the glamour of art will not be artists for that reason. The web is robbing people of power and initiative, qualities indispensable for the artist. And I don't mean the web is bad per se ..it is the people who are weak - which is normal for most - and need a strong hand and much discipline to be educated in the realities of art and music. Otherwise they have no chance as most are not born to art, just as most physicists are not born to physics like Einstein...They need real help in college. They don't get taught tabs in physics!!! and they do not teach aeronautic engineering by cartoons either!

The story above-in the first and second posts - of learning by ear is true . I learned composition and theory in a music school where artists who created and recorded with major artists also taught..so I was taught the right way, the real way..but I did not need that to be an artist .However It was not the average institutional pompous but impotent academic's vapid rhetoric that was transmitted, it was the truth taught by those who lived it, not by those who had studied it second hand from an impotent man's perspective as is most of academia in the arts.

Also if one never discovers anything by oneself one will be such a normal well adjusted eunuch incapable of creating anything.

Copying tabs and endless copying of theory and composition rules of style and regulations are the reasons why those who do that never amount to anything unique and personal.

Nevertheless it was always like this historically ...only the ones born to art will be artists and think for themselves. The rest will be brainwashed into oblivion and mediocrity by their very own indifference. In the old days it was school brainwashing, today it is web.TV, and school.

Art lives and exists outside of media and academia. Art lives inside the human heart. cyber-Media is nothing but a conveyance, a transmission apparatus for the masses. Academia-when it comes to art- is de facto an ossified circus of mummified misunderstandings and mostly unintentional lies and absurdities, unless real artist are actually teaching...which happens infrequently.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ney_mello
http://www.youtube.com/user/NeyMelloOfficial?
http://bit.ly/aSUSw6
http://www.musicarts.com/Stores/Store.a ... 320&mode=1
http://www.facebook.com/pages/NEY-MELLO/8702485599
http://www.myspace.com/neymello
http://www.twitter.com/NeyMelloGuitar

by **jordan_majel** » Sun Dec 12, 2010 4:29 pm

Ney, I think I get your point and agree with you, but let me ask you - what learning composition and theory gave you?

by **Stan** » Sun Dec 12, 2010 10:48 pm

jordan_majel wrote:Ney, I think I get your point and agree with you, but let me ask you - what learning composition and theory gave you?

A solid foundation! :lol:

by **N E Y** » Fri Dec 17, 2010 11:35 pm

jordan_majel wrote:Ney, I think I get your point and agree with you, but let me ask you - what learning composition and theory gave you?

It expanded my understanding of how music can be structured formally and in terms of its many messages.
Music is not just for exagerated emotional indulgence and sensational booty shaking as many people seem to think :lol:

there is much more to it for the artist to convey.

Music transmits and embodies:

Physical messages to the body

Emotional messages to the emotions

Philosophical and poetic messages to the mind.

Atmospheric messages about moods and situations

Geographic and architectural messages about landscapes and civilizations not accessible otherwise to us.

Biological messages about other species from other dimensions and other galaxies as wel as right here on earth.

Messages from other dimensions

Spiritual messages

and....Lots of booty-shaking and pathetic emotional indulgence of the most self-absorbed kind of course..when applicable. So since so many crave the booty(madly) and are so egotistically self-centered it follows that they think that music is only about booty and what they feel emotionally and nothing else :lol: